


Snow in Dusseldorf

by Sophia_Bee



Series: X-men Canon Compliant Fics [7]
Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Dark, Erik has Issues, Gen, Holocaust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 10:56:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2729843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sophia_Bee/pseuds/Sophia_Bee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik doesn't like it when it snows. Canon/pre-canon, set in the 1950s approximately 10 years after the end of WWII. Erik is in the Nazi Hunter phase and returns to Dusseldorf, the city he lived in before he and his parents were sent to the concentration camp.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snow in Dusseldorf

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Garonne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Garonne/gifts).



> Written for the prompt: _Something to do with Erik remembering his life before WW2. Could be the main focus of the fic or just the inspiration. (Could also be Erik/Charles if you want) ___
> 
> I hope you like it. It came out quite dark.

The metal spheres fly around his fingers faster and faster and Erik likes the way the metal brushes against his skin. It soothes him, and these days very little else does. His hand trembles from exertion but he does not rest, does not stop the balls. He is mesmerized by their patterns as they slide in and out, around his hands, the long fingers unmoving, an exercise in control.

It's winter. Erik hates this time of year. He glances out the window and the sky’s a never-ending expanse velvet blackness, stretching above the lights of the city, and he can barely see the stars because of the lights below. It’s started snowing, little flakes fleck the darkness as they float down, disappearing into the pools of light left by the street lamps below. People walk on the street below, pulling their coats up to block out the cold wind that’s started to blow, arms full of packages, children clutching at the hands of their parents, hurrying alongside them, trying not to slip as the snow starts to coat the ground, leaving slushy footprints behind them. Erik shivers reflexively because the hotel is postwar construction, constructed cheaply and quickly, meaning the window glass is thin. The temperature outside is well below freezing, so cold is radiating into the room. It’s the kind of cold that settles into your bones, but Erik barely notices it. Nothing will ever match the cold Erik felt in the camps, huddled in the hole that Schmidt kept him in between experiments in cruelty, a skeleton of a boy surrounded by concrete walls that would never feel warm, even on the hottest days, breathing in frozen, stinking air that burned into his lungs. Erik doesn’t mind the cold. He’s lived through being cold more nights than he can count. That’s not what bothers him about this time of year.

Winter is always hard. Some years have been unbearable. Some have been better. This ranks amongst the worst, but maybe not worse than the year he didn't sleep whenever it snowed. That year he would sit holding a loaded gun in his hand, staring at it night after night, daring himself to finally put it to his temple and pull the trigger as the snow blanketed the New York streets outside the dingy rented room he was staying in.

Summer is better. Summer is distracting and the days are long and filled with light. Winter is dark and eternal and that is when he can’t stop the memories. Darkness reminds him too much of the camps, where it seemed that even at the height of summer everything was cast in shadows, even the air seemed dingy with ashes. Except the lab. The lab was bright, shining, lights that always made Erik blink. It was a reprieve from the darkness until the pain set in.

Erik lets the balls drop to the bedspread and leaves them lying there. He wonders why he came here. Now. In the winter. Why did he think this would be a good idea. Why did he think he could hold the memories at bay, that he might be strong enough to keep the ghosts away this time. He’s such a fool.

He knows why. It’s the hunt. The one he’s been on for years now, going from country to country, staring into the eyes of killers as they take their last breath, realizing that they are not going to escape paying for their sins. It’s the drive for retribution that allowed him to tell himself that the chance to kill another ex-Nazi would make coming here bearable.

Still…

He’s been here for two days and already the memories are assaulting him, clustering in his mind, refusing to be brushed away. Mama and papa, smiling, wading through snow that seemed so deep he could be swallowed up, strapping on ice skates, holding mama’s hand as she wobbled next to him. Happy memories that seem strange and out of place, like they happened to someone else, a film he's watching from the outside. His life does not contain this sort of happiness and sometimes he thinks the memories belong to someone else.

Erik wishes he could take some solace in those memories, borrowed or not, could find some peace in that fact that he thinks at one point he was happy, but he can’t. In the background of each one are signs of what was to come. Papa coming home telling mama that there had been people outside his shop that day. All Erik could hear was that they were holding signs. His parents moved to talk in the kitchen, leaving Erik reading the Torah on the couch of their small apartment with it’s comfortable clutter, over stuffed furniture and pictures of their family displayed on the mantle. All of that would be gone in a few years, the pictures smashed on the floor under the heavy boots of the SS who came to take them away, the furniture looted, the whole apartment littered in papers as the Schutzstaffel tore apart their home looking for the money they said all Jews hid. His mother crying in the corner, a bruise blooming purple on her cheek.

Erik walked the streets the first night he arrived, the lamps casting yellow circles of light onto the snowy ground, and he recognized a row of houses, a park on the corner, a statue that he’d chased birds around as papa played chess with his friends at a nearby table. It’s like his body has memory of this place and he finds himself walking down streets he thinks he knew once. He stood staring at the empty lot where the synagogue was before they burned it to the ground, eyes wet with tears. Even though it’s been a little more than 10 years since the end of the war, he could see its traces everywhere he walked that night. A shell of a building draped in white drifts of snow, bombed by the allies and never fully cleaned up. A homeless man on a park bench staring into the darkness, his eyes haunted, and Erik knew he was still stuck in the war. The whole city is shell-shocked, people rushing here and there without looking up, the light gone out of their eyes. Ten years is not enough time for a city to recover, to deal with the destruction, to look at her own sins. There is no reconciliation here. For any of them and least of all for Erik.

Erik remembers a time when this was a place full of life, with street cars rattling down rails on cobblestone streets and their neighbors waving as he walked to synagogue with mama on one side and papa on the other, his yarmulke secured on his head with a pin, wearing his best clothes. Even though papa had said the man with the signs were outside the store again, looking worried, nothing felt much different for Erik. He kept looking for the men papa described, waiting for them to yell angry words, but their weekly walk to synagogue was uneventful. Until the synagogue was attacked and they didn’t go anymore. That was right before the yellow stars. That was when the city didn’t look so beautiful anymore and everyone looked away from the star on his coat that declared him to be less than vermin.

The snow keeps drifting down, the flurries turning to a thick curtain of white outside the hotel window. Erik takes in a deep breath and wonders if this particular quarry was worth the memories, worth coming back here.

The last time he was in Dusseldorf in the snow he was standing in a line with mama and papa, each of them holding onto a suitcase. They didn’t know where they were going. All they had left in the world was in those bags. Their apartment was gone. Papa had lost his job. Their money was gone, used to buy overpriced food and necessities. They were lined up against the wall of a centuries old building, the snow falling softly onto their heads, and mama shivered a little, and pulled her scarf tighter around her neck. SS walked down the line of people, slowly, guns in their hands, and everytime they pass, Erik had looked away. On the ancient stone of the building someone had taken a can of paint and sprayed the words ‘Achtung Juden’. Erik remembers staring at it, not understanding why anyone would want to warn someone about him. He was just a boy. A very cold boy shivering in a thin winter coat that’s has too short of sleeves because papa could not afford a new one. He is thin and hungry, although mama had given him her last slice of bread that morning, just before the men came bursting through the door. She had told him to eat up. That a growing boy needed food. Erik can still remember how that bread tasted, dry and crumbling in his mouth. He can still taste the salt of the tears as he stood shivering with the snow coming down, clinging to his mother, not knowing what was to come next. The memory burns so brightly it hurts. He tastes salt now as a single tear escapes the edges of his eye and trails down his cheek.

Mein gott, why did he come here? Did he not realize he would relive it all?

The first night in Dusseldorf when he walked the streets he finds that building. The graffiti isn’t there. There is little trace of the Nazi’s hatred outside the souls they destroyed, the families they obliterated, the bodies they burned leaving piles of ash outside the crematorium, not even bothering with the decency to cover up what they’d done as they fled ahead of the approaching Russian army. Erik remembers one of the guards telling another that the Russians were sure to be cruel and Erik thought that the guards didn’t realize that they had managed to redefine cruelty. The guards weren’t wrong. If the Nazis redefined cruelty, the Russians augmented it, but that wasn’t something that haunted Erik. It was just a fact. Humanity’s capacity for cruelty sometimes seems endless to him.

Erik stood along that wall, gazing up at it, not moving as the snow came down, sticking on his eyelashes. He had this strange childish urge to stick out his tongue and taste it, to be able to remember being seven years old again and not having a care in the world. Past that age, all he can remember is feeling the burden of the world, and sometimes at night he cries for the childhood he’s lost. He turned from the walland started to walk back to the hotel, and his soul felt heavy. That heaviness hasn’t left him as he sits on the hotel bed lost in thought.

There is a man who lives in Dusseldorf. A bad man. A man who fell asleep tonight, belly full of dinner, and Erik wonders if he will have pleasant dreams. Or does hear the screams of all the people he’s killed. Do they come in the darkness to haunt him? Either way, he will not die tomorrow like Erik intended. Erik cannot stay in Dusseldorf. Not in the snow. Not with the memories battering him.

Erik picks up the balls off the comforter, feeling their weight in his hand. He stands up grabs his bag. An hour later he checks out of the hotel walks towards the train station. Maybe one day he can return to Dusseldorf in the winter. Maybe one day he’ll be able to be here in the snow and not feel like he’s going to fly apart. Today is not that day.

~fin~


End file.
